William Finley passed away yesterday morning following a surgery, details of which are unknown at this time. He was 71. Born in 1940, Finley met Brian De Palma at college, and began acting in De Palma's early films, beginning with the award-winning short, Woton's Wake. It is next to impossible to think of De Palma's cinema without William Finley. He appeared onscreen in seven of De Palma's feature films: The Wedding Party, Murder à la Mod, Dionysus In '69, Sisters, Phantom Of The Paradise (Finley's most famous and beloved role), The Fury, and The Black Dahlia. Finley also provided the offscreen voice of Bobbi in De Palma's Dressed To Kill. In the early 1980s, Finley helped one of De Palma's Home Movies students from Sarah Lawrence College, Charlie Loventhal, by contributing to the script of Loventhal's directorial debut, The First Time. Finley appeared in three films by cult horror director Tobe Hooper: Eaten Alive, The Funhouse, and Night Terrors. Filmmaker Edgar Wright, who counts Phantom Of The Paradise as one of his favorite films, posted on his blog tonight about hearing the news of Finley's passing. Wright notes that Finley's other roles "included Marshall Brickman’s underseen and underrated comedy Simon with Alan Arkin," and "the bonkers Silent Rage." Finley also had an uncredited role in John Huston's Wise Blood.

Below is the intro to De Palma's Murder à la Mod, which features a theme song written and performed by Finley, who also stars in the film as Otto.

In the above tweet from Janos Matuschewski, he writes, "If I'm not mistaken, one could probably watch Ridley Scott on Monday on Torstrasse shooting his film Passion. A note on a door there suggests it." A couple of minutes after that post, Matuschewski clarified that he meant Brian De Palma, not Ridley Scott. Meanwhile, the IMDB page for Passion has added the name of the film's costume designer (Karen Muller Serreau) and art director (Astrid Poeschke). Serreau was the costume supervisor on Alain Corneau's Love Crime, and she actually did work with Ridley Scott as the wardrobe supervisor on A Good Year. She was also Robert De Niro's dresser on John Frankenheimer's Ronin. In recent years, Serreau has become a regular costume designer for French director Anne Fontaine, and has also worked on a couple of Luc Besson productions. Poeschke has worked with Passion's production designer Cornelia Ott on Black Book, Valkyrie, and V For Vendetta, and was also the supervising art director on Timo Vuorensola's Iron Sky, the sci-fi comedy about Nazi's invading Earth in 2018, after having set up a secret base on the moon in 1945. The latter was one of the most talked-about films at the Berlin Film Festival this past February.

ARMOND: 'DETENTION' 360-PAN IS HOMAGE TO 'BLOW OUT'JOSEPH KAHN FILM ALSO FEATURES BULLY CHARACTER NAMED BILLY NOLANMusic video and commercial director Joseph Kahn's second feature film, Detention, opens in select AMC theaters today, before moving on to other cities later on. Kahn financed the high school-set, genre-busting film himself, so that he could call all the shots without argument. Detention is aimed at today's teenagers, who Kahn believes are bored by the movies Hollywood generally gears toward them. The film, which features deliberate references to many many films, is Kahn's call for the death of genres. According to City Arts' Armond White, the film includes a 360-degree pan that is an homage to a similar pan in Brian De Palma's Blow Out:

There’s a continuous 360-degree pan through eleven years of pop song totems and teen fads that sneaks up on you as one of the most fantastically detailed set-pieces in modern movies. It’s also an homage to Brian De Palma’s vertiginous 360-pan in Blow Out. Both De Palma and Kahn use their technical aplomb and social acuity to similarly encircle a moral void. Kahn’s De Palma trickery may obscure his own considerable point about cultural overload (also De Palma’s unconscious panic).

Not sure if this is the scene White is referring to, but Kahn describes his favorite sequence of Detention in an interview with Caliber's Katherine Sziraczky:

I like my teen throwback sequence in the movie, where we go through the eras in detention. Who makes throwbacks for teens? Most people assume that teens haven’t lived long enough to recognize a throwback, but that scene shows you how fast society changes for new young people. Things change so fast, hairstyles, music, that little sequence just throws it in your face, this is a whole new world.

In what is surely a nod to Carrie (both the novel and the film), Kahn, who co-wrote the screenplay for Detention, has a character named Billy Nolan, which was also the name of the character played by John Travolta in De Palma's film adaptation of Stephen King's novel.

BRITISH ACTOR CAST AS 'PASSION' DETECTIVEIAN T. DICKINSON HAS BEEN BASED IN BERLIN SINCE 1995The IMDB's page for Brian De Palma's Passion has added Ian T. Dickinson to the cast credits. Dickinson, a British actor who is a well-established figure in the German film/TV/theatre community (he speaks English and German), is portraying the detective in De Palma's film. According to Dickinson's web site, in the early 1980s, he co-founded and managed the independent record label Anxious Records with Dave Stewart. Dickinson has appeared in Wim Wenders' Person To Person, Hal Hartley's Fay Grim, and James McTeigue's V For Vendetta. Last year, an independent film Dickinson appeared in, Alex Ross' Tom Atkins Blues, played in German cinemas for 53 consecutive weeks. That film was shot in 11 days for about $2,500. Dickinson has the lead role in Ross' new film, the Berlin-set Weak Heart Drop.

GUY MADDIN WANTS TO THANK DE PALMA FOR 'PHANTOM'SAYS THE FILM'S POPULARITY WAS JUST TOO BIG A SUBJECT FOR 'MY WINNIPEG'Guy Maddin was interviewed by A.V. Club's Sam Adams, who asked the My Winnipeg filmmaker about the popularity of Brian De Palma's Phantom Of The Paradise in his hometown:

AVC: As you mentioned, you grew up in Winnipeg, one of the only places in the world, except for Paris, where Brian De Palma’s The Phantom Of The Paradise was a hit.

GM: Paul Williams is a god in Winnipeg. An ex-girlfriend of mine stalked him to his hotel room. That was a strange relationship. But anyway.

AVC: Were you a Phantom fan?

GM: Saw it once. Listened to the soundtrack album a million times playing pool as an 18-year-old. Thought it was one of the iconic great films for so many years, because as a Winnipeger, it was so huge in the local zeitgeist, the civic-geist. I couldn’t believe when I later found that among De Palma buffs, it’s ranked like the 40th-best of his films. Because I was thinking, “Well okay, there’s Phantom Of Paradise, then there’s Dressed To Kill.” I thought it was like discussing Capra and going, “... It’s A Wonderful Life, which isn’t even a movie.” I’ve ridden in an elevator three times with Brian De Palma over the years. You’re in the same hotel and you’re just—“It’s Brian De Palma, I just gotta fucking…” The first time I saw him he was 6-foot-7, literally. The last time I saw him, he’s like whatever his real height is, or maybe much shorter, like 4-foot-2 or something. I don’t know, but every time I feel like throwing myself at his feet and thanking him for Phantom Of Paradise.

I didn’t even get into Phantom Of Paradise in My Winnipeg. It was too big of a subject. It’s a strange place. All I can say is, it’s one of the last isolated big cities, 700,000 people. The same size as Austin, the capital of Texas. It’s got no hinterland. There’s no one living within an eight-hour drive of the place, maybe a couple of really dinky towns. It’s just the biggest isolated city in North America; it’s right in the center, and it’s Siberia cold, so that isolation produces some quirky results. It’s a Petri dish no one sneezes on. We’re just breathing our own sneezes all the time.

FRANK WITTER JOINS 'PASSION' CASTAS THEATRE USHER, ACCORDING TO IMDBA new name has been added to the IMDB's cast credits for Brian De Palma's Passion. According to the site, German actor Frank Witter plays the theatre usher in the film. This would undoubtedly be at the movie theatre frequented by Noomi Rapace's character. It will be interesting to see what she chooses to watch there.

'THE FURY' TO SCREEN AT ACTIONFEST 2012STUNTMAN MICKEY GILBERT TO DO Q&A AT NORTH CAROLINA EVENT APRIL 13Although it is not mentioned yet on the event's official web site, Brian De Palma's The Fury will be presented by Mickey Gilbert at the 2012 ActionFest, which runs April 12-15 in Asheville, North Carolina. Gilbert, who is picking up a Lifetime Achievement Award at this year's fest, was the stunt coordinator on The Fury. He also worked as a stuntman on Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, which will also be screened at the festival. According to Mountain Xpress, Gilbert will provide an introduction and Q&A at the screening of The Fury, which will be held at 7:30pm Friday, April 13th, at The Carolina theater in Asheville.

Rob Paulsen is famed for his voice acting in the cartoons Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Pinky And The Brain, and Animaniacs, but early in his career, he had a small yet memorable role in Brian De Palma's Body Double. In that film, Paulsen played a pornographic movie camerman who, after filming a scene of Jake Scully making out with Holly Body, delivers the scene's classic punchline: "Where's the cum-shot?" the cameraman asks the director, who seems hypnotized by the scene in front of him. "The cum-shot. I thought we were doing Body Talk here, not Last Tango!" Paulsen spoke to Dan Roberts last week, and near the end of the interview (which can be listened to in the YouTube video above), Roberts, a De Palma fan, asks Paulsen about his experience on the film. Paulsen relays a funny story about how his kids found out about him being in the movie years later.

'DIONYSUS' FILM APPROPRIATED INTO ART INSTALLATIONOVERLAPPING PROJECTIONS FORM PIECE BY ROSE KALLAL AT GALLERY IN SCOTLANDThe Hidden Noise gallery, located in Glasgow, Scotland, is currently hosting an exhibition by New York artist Rose Kallal. Kallal is presenting Implicate, Explicate, a 16mm film installation "created especially for The Hidden Noise with a soundtrack produced in collaboration with Mark Pilkington," according to the gallery's web site. "The overlapping projections appropriate footage from sources as diverse as Brian De Palma’s Dionysus to contemporary 3D simulations of fractals, as well as her own original footage." The exhibition, which includes works by Anni Albers, Josef Albers, and Victoria Morton, runs through April 14th.